QQC 3

“Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little “stonebreaking,” as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously, and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in top hats and dark suits, except for Reverend William Buckland of Oxford, whose habit it was to do his fieldwork in an academic gown.”


I think that if they had just put on some normal clothes they would have found their job/hobby to be a little easier. Yeah. Everyone back then was about propriety and image. Maybe if they had discovered the wonder of working clothes they probably would have been more comfortable.

“Depending on whim and availability, guests to Buckland’s house might be served baked guinea pig, mice in batter, roasted hedgehog, or boiled Southeast Asian sea slug Buckland was able to find merit in them all, except the common garden mole, which he declared disgusting. Almost inevitably, he became the leading authority on coprolites - fossilized feces - and had a table made entirely out of his collection of specimens.”


Oh dear lord. I can't imagine the his guests faces when they brought out boiled sea slug. Ewww...I think if I were visiting him I would bring my own food. I saw a cooked guinea pig on the travel channel once  and it did not look good. It could stand up on its own and it was really crunchy.

“Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake in the middle of the night, her husband crying in exitement: “My dear, I believe that Cheirotherium’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.” Together they hurried to the kitchen in their night clothes. Mrs. Buckland made a flour paste, which she spread across the table, while Reverend Buckland fetched the family tortoise. Plunking it onto the paste, they goaded it forward and discovered to their delight that its footprints did indeed match those of the fossil Buckland had been studying.”


It must take some special women to put up with these men. I hope Mr. Buckland appreciated his wife enough. 

“It can all get terribly confusing to nonspecialists but to a geologist these can be matters of passion. “I have seen grown men glow incandescent with rage over this metaphorical millisecond in life’s history,” the British paleontologist Richard Fortey has written with regard to a long-running twentieth-century dispute over where the boundary lies between the Cambrian and Ordovician.”


Wow...Can't anybody compromise? 

“He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).”


What the heck? Animals need nice names too...Nipple-teeth. What?

“In that same year, 1818, Casper Wistar died, but he did gain a certain unexpected immortality when a botomist named Thomas Nuttall named a delightful climbing shrub after him. Some botanical purists still insist on spelling it wistaria.”


Wistar should claim the rights to Desperate Housewives.

“Once while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him and down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlor. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retrieved the head, and rushed out again.”


That's why I'm never becoming a doctor. Oh I can just imagine the peoples faces when the head rolled in then their thoughts after he left. LOL

“Once his wife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway.”


Like I said, special women.

“At one point he ran into a part of suspicious Crow Indians, but he managed to win them over by repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth.”


WIN.